Cedrick is a variant of Cedric, a name popularized in English literature by Sir Walter Scott.
Cedrick is a variant spelling of Cedric, a name with one of the more unusual origin stories in English nomenclature: it was quite possibly invented. Sir Walter Scott introduced Cedric as the name of Rowena's guardian in his wildly popular 1819 historical novel *Ivanhoe*, set in Norman-conquered England. Scott likely adapted it from Cerdic, the name of the semi-legendary sixth-century founder of the Kingdom of Wessex — a figure of disputed historicity whose name may itself derive from a Brittonic Celtic root.
Whether Scott misread the name, deliberately altered it, or heard it differently, Cedric emerged from *Ivanhoe* as something that felt ancient without actually being fully traceable. Despite — or perhaps because of — its literary manufacture, Cedric caught on in the Victorian era with remarkable speed. It was reinforced by Frances Hodgson Burnett's 1886 novel *Little Lord Fauntleroy*, whose hero, Cedric Errol, was a gentle, noble-hearted American boy who inherits an English earldom.
The Fauntleroy association gave Cedric a certain precious, velvet-suit quality that persisted through the early twentieth century and contributed to its gradual decline as a common name. By mid-century it read as fussy where it had once read as noble. The -ck spelling of Cedrick adds a harder, more assertive edge to the name's ending, a small orthographic rebellion against the softer -c of the original.
In African-American naming tradition particularly, Cedric — and variants like Cedrick — enjoyed a substantial revival from the 1970s onward, partly through celebrity association with comedians like Cedric the Entertainer (born Cedric Antonio Kyles). This revival stripped away the Fauntleroy stuffiness and gave the name an entirely different cultural charge: confident, warm, and witty.